HarpiaGrid: A Geography-Aware Grid-based Routing Protocol for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) is a research field attracting growing attention. Current routing protocols in VANETs usually use route discovery to forward data packets to the destination. In addition, if vehicle density is low in the network, there might not be vehicles available to deliver the packet. This paper proposes HarpiaGrid, a geography-aware grid-based routing protocol for VANETs. The protocol uses map data to generate a shortest transmission grid route, effectively trades route discovery communication overhead with insignificant computation time. By restricting packets in grid sequences rather than blindly greedy search and making use of route cache approach, HarpiaGrid reduces many unnecessary transmissions, thus greatly improving routing efficiency. Moreover, in the route maintenance, this work proposes a local recovery scheme and uses backtracking techniques to generate a new grid forwarding route, providing superior fault-tolerance capability. Experiments were conducted, and the results demonstrated that the proposed scheme is indeed more efficient than other protocols.